“Friendly Fascism”: The terrifying clairvoyance of Bertram Gross

Some three and a half decades ago, social science professor and former senior public official Bertram Gross authored a remarkably prescient book about politics and society in the U.S.: Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America. First published in 1980, with a revised edition issued in 1982, Friendly Fascism eerily anticipated the descent of America into a state of plutocracy — an increasingly authoritarian society run by the wealthy and powerful for their own benefit.

A defining fork in the road

In the preface to his 1982 edition, Gross identified two conflicting trends in American society:

The first is a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership. . . . The phrase “friendly fascism” helps distinguish this possible future from the patently vicious corporatism of classic fascism in the past of Germany, Italy and Japan. 

…The other is a slower and less powerful tendency for individuals and groups to seek greater participation in decisions affecting themselves and others. . . . It is embodied in larger values of community, sharing, cooperation, service to others and basic morality as contrasted with crass materialism and dog-eat-dog competition.

Gross went on to identify a group of people who were consolidating power in America:

I see at present members of the Establishment or people on its fringes who, in the name of Americanism, betray the interests of most Americans by fomenting militarism, applauding rat-race individualism, protecting undeserved privilege, or stirring up nationalistic and ethnic hatreds.  (more...)

“Friendly Fascism”: The terrifying clairvoyance of Bertram Gross